My favorite game that I have ever played, nothing has ever come close to matching how much I love this one. The deduction is one part of it, yes, but obviously that only pulls through on your first, maybe second playthrough, if you ended up brute-forcing some of the fates at the end. But no, I've still been thinking about this game for nearly four years of me first playing it (at the time of writing this). And it's all thanks to the plot and characters. The first time around, the specifics of the plot and character personalities takes a backseat to the deduction gameplay. Many players may not even give a second thought to the fact that certain characters show up again and again, presenting a consistent personality every time, going through entire arcs and growth as the story progresses.

I have written paragraphs upon paragraphs analyzing and speculating about character motivations, personalities, and decisions, as well as their effects on the game's plot. I love (nearly) all of the characters, especially the midshipmen. If psychoanalyzing a bunch of dead sailors sounds like something you'd enjoy, consider playing Obra Dinn.

I always feel sad knowing that this game has all the right ingredients in it to sustain an entire fandom if it wanted to, but it never quite reached that level of popularity beyond praise for its game design (which is still a good thing, might I add!)

Oozing style. Obra Dinn hooks you incredibly strongly within the first hour of playing with stunning scenes, a puzzle-piece narrative, and great dialogue and sound. The use of audio in this one in particularly great, and the premise is brilliant. Obra Dinn is one of the best indie games available.

There are some minor gameplay annoyances - the UI still feels like its missing some functionality (though it tries its best), the pacing in the first half is a little off especially due to the line-following minigame going from corpse to corpse, and most of the tougher puzzles relied on extremely tiny details rather than broader, more clever deductions to solve.

What is this game?

You start by boarding a ship. Then get called back to the boat that you got there on, because your luggage is too heavy. You grab a log book and a compass from the luggage and enter the ship.
The log book has all the information given to you.
It seems you are an insurance investigator, who has to board the ship and figure out what has happened to the crew. Your report will be basis for any claims or rewards on the crew and their estates.
So... Detective work. Cool.
I get a map of travel, a picture of crew festivitas, a picture of asian passengers and a picture of a firing squad (these are 3 pictures that were drawn during the voyage and serve as visual aid for your work)
Also a complete crew manifest is available.
All the following pages are chapters of the voyage. Empty pages though. What happened? You must figure it out.
On the ship deck not much is present. Very little can be done. Only 1 passenger cabin can be accessed, empty, and 1 body present. Everything else is locked off.
I walk up to the dead body outside the captains quarters and the compass appears to tell me something can be done.
I press the left mouse button.
Woosh... And in to the rabbit hole I began the journey.


Chapter X, The End
Blank screen... People talking. 2 men wants to enter the captains quarters and are willing to do whatever it seems. But a uppety english voice tell them that this is not going to happen. BANG... a shot goes off.
This is done by sound, only aided with the voiced subtitles. Oh I am hooked.
Then a still image appears... I see the dead guy with a bullet pearcing his body, a crew member at his side, and a guy standing in underwear in the captains quarters with a gun pointed directly at the shot guy.
I can move. OHHHH I get to look at this still image in 3D.... I am so into this already!!!!
After 30-odd seconds, the vision fades. You are back on the deck with the remains of the shot man. But now the door to the Captain's quarters is open. I can enter, and I see dead people...

Who are these men? Why is this happening? How on earth am I going to figure this out? 60-ish crew on the manifest and I need to find them and figure out their fates? Will I ever be able to get on with my normal life before finishing this game? Questions that are vital and the primary basis for my existence from now on.

This game is not holding your hand in any way. You are going to have to love adventuring if you want to be happy about playing this game.
Absolutely only basics are given to you from the get go. Information on solving puzzles are given, but only what is absolutely needed and only when you may need the information. Until then all you do is deduce.

So basically you get a compass that can tell you the last scene of a dead persons life, accompanied by 10-30 seconds of audio prior to that snapshot of death.
The first scene you get is always the last scene of a chapter, and then the game unlocks another dead body that gives you the scene before that scene, until the entire chapter has been unlocked.

During the adventuring of the scenes you must observe and listen. You will be getting subtle and not so subtle hints. You must then use whatever knowledge you get to give each crew member a name/rank and a cause of death and if applicable the culprit.
You must use everything, from how people look to how they speak or what they say, to deduce what has happened.

After finishing this game I am awestruck by how good this game is. I am also finding it difficult to point out issues with it.
Well I could pound on the steep learning curve and no hint system if you get "lost". But then again, this is exactly why I loved this game. It was not too easy. I had to pay attention to every detail in every scene. Some scenes would give you information that has nothing to do with a person that died, but just subtle information on who a person was

I must admit that I failed my first playthrough. I got stuck. I put it down for a very long time, and just recently picked it up again. This time I sure was going to pull myself together. This second run I learned how to use the log books cross reference system, which I believe helped me tremendously.
I do believe that all the mechanics in this game are important and needed. How many games can you say that about them? I do not believe to have played that game.

If stripped down to basics, the game is very simple. But it is put so well together with a very catchy story that you just do not care.

The audio in this game is sublime. Some hints are audio only. So it is important that the audio is good. Reasearch into langauges, hiring of voice actors that can speak those languages and with correct accents IMO. I am from Denmark myself so even the dane and swede was spot on.

The graphics you could easily be critical off as it is VERY simple. 1-bit colours in an 8-bit resolution, or something approximating that. Many might give this game horrible grahics score, but not me. This was exactly the graphics that were needed for the gameplay. Some hints were VERY hard to see, and therefore made the deducing harder. Was that a knife he is stabbing that dude with or does he have another tool? If the graphics had been in full blown Unreal Engine with all the bells and whistles then I believe that many hints would have been easier. Also the charm of 19th century ship would have been gone. It seemed fitting for the times that we are in to have poor tools available for deducing.

The music score is also an awesome part of the game. It really pumps you up. Strings and brass, with pumping sounds that entice you to look around and take in whatever scene you are in. Sometimes I felt the still images of scenes to be alive because of the audio.

If you like adventures and puzzles, and you do not mind to think for yourself without a game serving the solution on a silver platter, then this game should be a must have.

This game made by 1 man? Really? Graphics design, programming, mechanics, storyboard AND music composer? Look, I could compose something too, but I will be the first to admit that it would not be at the same level as other things I can do. But Lucas Pope does all the parts so well. Is there anything he can't do?
I will surely look out for more from Lucas Pope...

i enjoyed my time in the obra dinn! it's a game i also enjoy watching others play because of the deductions behind certain things. im not sure if im biased in my next critique or not, but i feel like the last few crewmates were a lot of guesswork, but i was also playing into the wee hours of the morning and wanting to brute force the mystery instead of exploring over and over again. there were bits and pieces i did notice, but couldn't put them together to make the whole picture, if that makes sense. still, id love to replay the game once it's been wiped from my memory enough, and maybe ill bump it up once i refuse to brute force it!

A masterpiece. Obra Dinn in it's core is a detective game where you need to go back to past memories in an abandoned ship using a time traveling divice. This divice gives you a snap to the exact time someone died, helping you to achieve your goal of identifying everyone that was once aboard on the ghost ship, as well as discovering how they died. The lore is mysterious and gives off big cosmic horror vibes, a lot of things are left unanswered. It is a difficult game requiring a lot of inspecting. I found that I ended up a litte nauseous while playing it, not sure why, but probably because it's very difficult to distinguish background from front action, since everything runs in granulated B&W. Overall very good, but sadly it's a one time adventure with little to no replay value.